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🇮🇱🇵🇸 73,000 dead in Gaza, and Israeli advocate Joseph Cohen thinks that number isn't as bad as it looks
This is where my debate between Sami Hamdi and Joseph went completely off the rails.
Joseph insists Israel isn't pursuing territorial expansion. He says Israelis are fighting for their survival, and that the two-state solution is dead.
But Sami raised a question that goes to the heart of the entire conflict:
What gives one people the right to take another people's homes, restrict their movement, and then offer them whatever rights they're prepared to grant?
And then came the moment that changed the entire temperature of the debate.
Joseph cited 73,000 deaths in Gaza, then began subtracting estimated militants and deaths from natural causes to argue that Israel's civilian casualty figures compared favourably with other wars.
Sami couldn't believe what he was hearing: “Listen to him. 73,000 is just 73,000.”
Joseph argued that civilian deaths were tragic but unavoidable in a war against Hamas.
Sami's response was devastatingly simple: “Joseph, don't do it to the kids.”
He reminded Joseph of the Holocaust, of the persecution Jewish people endured, and of the moral responsibility not to inflict suffering on another population.
And that leaves us with the question at the centre of this entire confrontation:
When does defending your people's right to survive become an argument for the suffering of another people?
And who gets to draw that line?
@SALHACHIMI, @israel_advocacy
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Top reply · ♥ 22
Mike R @MikeRouah ·
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Hey, you devious, race-obsessed bigot.
Sami Hamdi ימ"ש holds zero genuine concern for the children of Gaza.
He places the death of a mass-murdering, satanic Hamas combatant on the same moral plane as that of an innocent Gazan child.
He rejects any Jewish claim to sovereignty, and does not believe that Israeli Jews have any right to fight the so-called Palestinian resistance groups.
He invokes the Holocaust with cynical calculation, forcing a ludicrous comparison that no stretch of any sane mind in existence can sustain against the realities of urban warfare.
Dozens of urban conflicts rage at this very moment, no fewer than 38, and not one of them has escaped child casualties.
His tunnel vision and selective fury fixate solely on Gaza. His stubborn refusal to examine the actual breakdown of the death toll, separating combatants from noncombatants and accounting for natural deaths, alone reveals him as the Jew-hating Nazi fraud he is.
He clings to the figure of 73,000 as though the Prophet Muhammad himself etched it in stone, rather than a ruthless terrorist organization that lies with every breath.
From his abominable, Himmleristic mouth he then dares to summon the Holocaust, pretending that because Jews suffered unspeakable horrors in the 1940s they must now extend endless mercy to others at the cost of their own survival.
No, fool. The gibbering nonsense this Nazi savage vomits out has nothing to do with the actual requirements of international humanitarian law.
IHL requires a clear distinction between combatants and noncombatants, together with the adoption of feasible precautions.
Israel issued extensive, unmistakable warnings in advance, employed precision munitions, and struck Hamas infrastructure with a level of care and restraint that stands apart from any credible public standard of urban combat.
To brandish the raw death toll while deliberately ignoring the stark contrast between near-total physical destruction across Gaza and the remarkably LOW civilian fatalities is pure deception.
Anyone who claims that roughly 74,000 deaths, of which approximately 26,000 were combatants and an estimated 12,000 stemmed from natural causes, leaving about 36,000 civilian war casualties, amounting to no more than 1.7 percent of the population, somehow equals genocide has completely abandoned sound reason.
No coherent account exists for how such catastrophic structural ruin could claim the lives of no more than 1.7 percent of the civilian population across two full years of intense, ferocious fighting if the true aim had been genocide.
The only possible explanation is that the IDF expended enormous and unprecedented effort to reduce harm to civilians to the lowest possible.
